


I Said to My Soul, Be Still

by LinearA



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dark Rey (Star Wars), Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Femdom, Jedi Ben Solo, Porn with Feelings, Woman on Top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2019-10-25 05:36:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17719100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinearA/pseuds/LinearA
Summary: Her black boot lashes out, the heavy heel against his shoulder, throwing him on his back in the dirt.  "Show me your heart,Jedi.”But it’s not his heart she’s looking at as she stands over him.  Her weapon is deactivated and fastened to her belt in one gesture; without its red blaze she looks more human.  Younger.  But there’s a lurid glow in her gaze as she rakes his bare chest with her eyes and lingers appraisingly on the point of his humiliation, his loss of self-control.(Originally posted to Tumblr.  Ben Solo makes a desperate stand to save the Resistance, but Snoke's apprentice isn't quite ready to kill him.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bombastique](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bombastique/gifts).



The way she uses the Force is terrifying. The Force is with Ben, in the sense that he feels it by him, all the time; he reaches out and the Force is there. But the Force is _with her_ in an entirely different way; it’s not a tool Lady Ren uses or an ally she calls on but an armor, an exoskeleton, an extension of herself. It’s her will, he recognizes, her mad determination that bends the weave of the universe around her.

“Even at your age, your uncle would have had me on my knees by now,” she tells him. And it’s probably true. He’s not as good as Uncle Luke, not as skilled, or smiling, or serene. But what do they _want_ from him; he’s — _be who and where you are; it doesn’t matter what someone else might have done. Only you are yourself, in this moment._ And he’s holding his own, against Snoke’s protégée; he’s fought her to a stand-still among the stones of this eerie planet with its blue sun distant in the sky, keeping her occupied as the Resistance evacuates behind him. She’s fast and light and has the advantage of the treacherously balanced rocks; his size is against him on this ground, and the Force swirls dizzyingly around him; every step seems haunted by the possibility that he has put his foot in the wrong place, his guard in the wrong quarter, his trust in the wrong side.

But if she has will, he has faith. He’s seen the power of the light, and even if he dies here, it will not desert him.

He lunges low, at her legs. She leaps up, and slashes down at his extended arm. They both have to fall back, bracing themselves against boulders. The wind blows her hair into her face. The wisps of it seem incongruously soft.

He gets his footing back before she does, and goes on the attack, trying to keep his strokes controlled and efficient She smiles at him as she dodges and parries. "You could have me on my knees too, you know,” she says, and pushes an image into his mind, at the same time that she sets the Force twitching under his feet, and he stumbles on the rocks.

He falls, hard, on a small flat patch, his blue blade skipping from his hand and going dead. She’s going to kill him. It’s all right. His parents must be leaving now, the heart of the Resistance with them. He hears her foot hit the stone above him, and tries to rise from his knees and call his saber, but he knows it has to come, the heat and the pain of the blow, but he’s done what he could, and the light will not abandon him — _there is no death; there is only the Force. I am one with the Force and —_

The heat comes, but only heat, only a little. She’s stopped her blade centimeters from his neck. It drones beside his ear. She pushes the image into his head again, and holds it there, so that he has to take in other things than the obvious (the obscenity, the wicked way she smiles) — he’s not himself, in the picture she shows him. That’s his nose, his hair, his hand that’s tight on her head, but his clothes, the way he stands — he looks — dark. Dangerous.

Ben knows what he is. He’s strong. He’s large, and a little awkward. He’s the servant of the light. And above all he is _trying_. Trying to his family’s patience. Trying to be at peace. He’s not — that. That man in her mind has no peace.

“Peace is a lie,” she breathes in his ear, over the hot hum of her weapon. And when the dark used to whisper to him at night, it had told him that, over and over, but it had seemed to mean something different — that the light was only a delusion the weak cling to, that the world was harsh and cold, ready to kill him if he didn’t strike first. When the dark speaks in her voice, it means something else entirely. "There is only passion.“

Her gloved hand is small, but it cups his chin perfectly, drawing his face up. Her grip is warm and her weapon is still at his throat. "Have you ever been kissed, Jedi?” She sounds curious. Excited. He has pressed his face against someone’s, he thinks, some time, maybe, but whatever she’s threatening to do, no one has ever done it before. Something terrible is happening to his blood. He shakes his head, and her thumb rubs his skin, just grazing his lip.

And then her mouth crushes his, opens his, and no one has ever done _anything_ like this to him before. She smells like sweat and tastes like hot metal, like catastrophic atmospheric reentry. Her black leather glove caresses his throat, and reaches lower, into his robe and under his shirt. He closes his eyes and tries to call for the light. Her fingers find his nipple, and stroke. She is an emergency, and he is not prepared.

“You stumble because you hold yourself back. Because you worship control.” She kisses him again. "But your heart is violent. I can feel it.“ He’s sure she can feel it, the way it pounds beneath her hand. She pinches his nipple, lightly; she hurting him; he’s hurt; he’s hard as stone and mindless with shocking pleasure, twisting so wildly under her hands he almost cuts his own throat on her saber.

She laughs and draws away from him, raising her blade, dragging his collar up, and she’s only been toying with him; now she’ll kill him. The last of the Skywalkers, and he’s going to die whimpering, cock stiff for the touch of Snoke’s apprentice. She slashes, hard, and he feels cold air on his stomach; she’s cut his clothes open.

Her black boot lashes out, the heavy heel against his shoulder, throwing him on his back in the dirt. "Show me your heart, _Jedi_.” But it’s not his heart she’s looking at as she stands over him. Her weapon is deactivated and fastened to her belt in one gesture; without its red blaze she looks more human. Younger. But there’s a lurid glow in her gaze as she rakes his bare chest with her eyes and lingers appraisingly on the point of his humiliation, his loss of self-control.

She puts her boot on him again, not on his shoulder but at his neck, the toe just beneath the bulge in his throat, and presses down. He fights for air and she laughs. It reassures him, oddly. This is the cruelty of the dark. He closes his eyes. _There is no death; there is only —_

She takes her foot off him, and watches him gasp. That look of _curiosity_ — he closes his eyes again. "Don’t play with your food.“

“How well do you take orders, Jedi?” Her voice is very close; he can feel her breath on his ear. "Because _I_ take them very badly.“ Her hand closes over his cock so suddenly and cruelly that he almost howls. She strokes him roughly; the muscles in his stomach spasm and he almost doubles up, knees to chest, but she slams his shoulders back into the dirt with the Force. He can’t even call it pleasure, what he’s feeling; it’s just _too much_. He gasps, rolling his head. "Shhh, shhhh,” she soothes him, and slows her hand. Something soft and strong closes around his thigh. She’s straddled his bent leg, holding it between her knees. As her hand keeps moving, she shifts herself down and back and begins to rub against him.

“I’ll play with you if I want,” she says, between her teeth. "Play with you, eat you, drag you back to Master Snoke a come-stained mess with the taste of me on your pretty lips.“

He tries. He tries so hard, not to imagine how she might taste (like salt, like blood, like an _emergency_ ), not to push his leg up closer against her, not to thrust his cock into her hand. He tries: _there is emotion, but there is peace_ — but it’s such a pale, dry word, _emotion_ , nothing to do with the burning in his blood, nothing to do with the maddening softness of her hand through his pants, and the closest thing he has to peace is the idea that he could fill her up, fit inside her like a missing piece.

He’d taken _pretty_ for an insult, but she takes her hand off him to plant both palms beside his head and kiss him with vicious thoroughness. "Never been _kissed_ ,” she mutters against his mouth. "Never been _fucked_.“ She slides down his lap, grinds herself directly against his hardness as she kisses him again. "You’re _obscene_.” Distantly, he’s baffled; he’s not the one who had an opportunity to kill an enemy and chose to rut in the dirt instead. But her mouth closes around his ear, warm and wet, so the thought is very far away. She sucks and tongues his ear and he writhes underneath the urgent press of her hips, and then she pushes another picture into his mind.

She’s naked, seated proudly on a high throne, and he half-kneels before her, ominous and angular in black. He lifts a heavy, black-gloved hand — _the way her eyes linger on that hand_ — and twitches her legs apart with the Force.

“Not me,” he gasps. "That’s not me.“

She takes his face in her hands. "But it _could_ be,” she says. "Ben, you could be — we could — _fuck, Ben —_ “

She reaches down to undo his pants, and he should be alarmed, but instead his foremost thought is, _she knows my name_. Of course she does; he’s not Uncle Luke, but of course Lady Ren, Snoke’s apprentice, would know his name. But it pulls at something in him, and even as her fingers pull his straining, weeping cock out of his pants, he lifts his hand to her cheek.

She jerks away, and rises off him slightly. She yanks off her gloves, digs her fingers into the seam of her trousers, and _tears_. Her bare hand on his naked cock is another shock, but it’s dulled by what he knows is coming: she’s so wet he feels her dripping down him even before she sinks down and he chokes on nothing. Her head lolls backwards and the sound she makes, aching and wounded, deep in her throat, makes his back arch and his hips pump.

“Yes,” she sighs. "Show me.“ She circles her hips. "You have no control. You don’t _need_ control. You’re _better_ than control.”

Another picture. He has her against the wall, his hands pinning hers, his cock thrusting cruelly and fast. Violent. And she’s moaning, mewling, welcoming it.

“We’d never take orders again, Ben.” She leans forward. Her breasts are hidden behind the heavy padding of her clothes, but her shoulders press them towards his mouth anyway. Like she can’t help it, like she wants to offer herself to him. "You’re so strong,“ she sighs, and her hands run over his arms. "So strong. But you’d be stronger in the dark.”

He reaches for her face again. It’s such a fine face, sharp and cleanly lined, and her cheeks are pink and her mouth is rosy and her hair is soft and he wants to touch her. But she jerks her head away again.

“The light is a lie,” she says. "Come with me, Ben. Let me show you.“

But the light is not a lie. It’s the brief frustration of his desire that sharpens his mind. Ben has seen the power of the light, has felt it come to save him when he thought dark dreams would eat his soul alive. And so he pushes a picture of his own into her mind.

She jerks back, but he puts his hands on her hips and pulls her against him. "You’re afraid,” he says. "Don’t be afraid.“

“I’m not,” she snarls, and rides him harder, as if that would prove it. And it feels so good, how tightly she squeezes him as she drags herself up and down his length; he lets it feel good, focuses on the pure pleasure of it, on the beauty of her body, even obscured by clothing meant for war. The gifts of the light are everywhere.  He smiles up at her, and she falters. He encourages her with his hands, helping her keep the pace. He shows her the picture again.

“You are.” It’s hard to talk, but he keeps his voice low and warm. "But you shouldn’t be.“

Her body curves with his, but it’s only his motion that’s keeping them going, now. Her eyes are closed, and tears are glimmering in her lashes.

“The light is not a lie.” She knows his name, and he knows hers. "Rey. The light is waiting for you.“

One more time, he shows her the picture: her head against his chest. Her eyes closed, lips parted. His arm around her, embracing and gentle. His hand moving softly in her hair. The kiss he drops on her sleeping head.

The tears run down her cheeks. "No one — _no one — waits for — ”_

His voice is full of strain; she’s tighter and tighter on him, and her hips are jerking, and he wants so badly to give her everything and watch her take it. "I do. I will. Rey.“

She spasms, twisting and sobbing, and he brings his hands up to her waist, pulling her down against his chest, and then runs his hands down, stroking and squeezing her gorgeous ass. The feel of it in his palms, luxuriously soft and stunningly strong, makes his cock twitch and his head burn, and he braces his feet and thrusts hard up into her, pouring hot spurts of come into her body in time with her cries.

He feels like his orgasm will never end, but when it does he doesn’t let her go. She pushes with her hands, and then with the Force, but he holds her.

"Just a minute,” he tells her softly. "Just a minute. Just until you stop crying.“ Because her tears are shaking her; if she tried to stand she would fall. He strokes her back, through the quilting of her jacket. "You don’t have to leave.” Sleep filters into his voice as he feels her sobs slow. "You don’t have to stay. Either way, I’ll wait for you.“

By the time her tears dry, they’re both asleep, alone together in the dust as the far away blue sun begins to set.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second chapter, as a birthday gift to Bombastique.

She wakes up first. She rolls off him, the Jedi, Ben Solo, and calls her weapon and his to her hands in a single gesture. She tries not to think of the different way it feels in her hand, the pure blue crystal. How much softer than the cracked and bleeding one she wields. She squats down beside him, a practical wide-footed squat, and watches him as he sleeps. His breath is slow. Something is strange; she feels strange. It bothers her.

_The light is waiting for you._

_Waiting is for fools,_ Master Snoke would say. His voice is only in her memory, like the Jedi’s, not in her head. Master Snoke is busy elsewhere, with Luke Skywalker. He’ll defeat Skywalker, and she’ll bring Ben Solo to him, and Snoke will turn him against his mother, and she’ll turn him against Snoke, because she’s only a little weaker than her master, and Ben Solo is very strong. For a Jedi. And when she had him, she’d never take orders again. She’d never have to wait again, in hope of a reward or in fear of punishment, because everything will be hers.

_The light is waiting for you._

No one waits for her. No one ever has, no one ever will. She should kill him. Right now. Lie to Master Snoke, tell him he gave her no choice. She stares at the soft line of his lashes. His hair shines on his forehead, and she follows the long lines of his face.

He wakes up. She sees his eyes flicker over her, waits for the fear to take him. But there’s only the faintest spark, too fast for her to seize on, and then there’s only him, his wide brown eyes looking at her.

“I could have killed you,” she says. “In your sleep.”

“Yes.” He sits up awkwardly; he must be very stiff. And sticky. She’s made no effort to cover him up, but she doesn’t look at his nakedness. Not when she can feel his come, still tacky on the seam of her leg, and the sting of his body inside hers. “But you didn’t. I trusted you not to, and you didn’t.”

“Why? Why did you trust me? I could have killed you.”

“You could have killed me before, too.” She looks away, at that. Ashamed, maybe. He doesn’t want her to be ashamed. “And I could feel you; you were tired. You wanted to sleep.”

She jumps up, pacing away from him. She feels the answer, now, what puzzled her when she woke up. She shoves it down, back, locks it away. But when she turns around, he’s frowning at her, his soft mouth pursed, and the locks come undone and it rushes out. “I didn’t have bad dreams. And you – you were asleep – do Jedi not have bad dreams?”

She didn’t want to ask, and she doesn’t want to know, and things don’t come back when she’s locked them up. It’s her first and most powerful skill. And he’s not _in_ her mind; if he tried that she’d know. She’d crush his mind with hers. His will is nothing next to hers. She knows that. She’s proved that. And her question troubles him, she can see that. He’s vulnerable here. She calms, a little. 

“I used to,” he says.

And she should press on that weakness, seek for his nightmares and draw them out, show him the strength the dark has given her against her own terrors. Because she is made strong in the dark; she depends on no one and she takes what she wants, and other people fear _her._ She is Mistress of the Knights of Ren; she is herself the nightmare of a hundred worlds. So why does she blurt like a child, in a thin child’s voice, “How? How did you stop?”

She feels sunk knee-deep in panic as he looks at her, licking his lips. Now he knows; he knows too much about her. That she has nightmares, and that she hates them and wants them to stop, wants it so badly, so badly she would ask questions of a _Jedi_ to make them stop. He can leverage her, push her with her fear and his knowledge. And she is remembering things she doesn’t want to remember, and she never does that, never, ever; she is remembering the desert, and worse than that, she remembers – 

She throws all her strength against it, a furious blow that clenches her fists and bares her teeth and makes the rocks around them grind and crack. And she does not remember.

“My uncle helped me,” he says. His voice. She hates his voice. She wants to wrap it around her neck and rub her face against the soft fur of it. “I had bad dreams. Terrible dreams. I was ashamed of them.”

“Why are you doing this?” she snarls.

“Doing what?” His face is so open. He’s sitting on the ground looking up at her, and she drops back to her knees, seizing that pale face in her hands.

“Why are you – showing me – making me show you – ” Soft points. Weak points. What should never show.

“I’m not making you show me anything,” he says mildly. “I’m just seeing you.”

She slaps his head aside, holds it there with the Force. “Don’t look at me!” But he can still see. She knows. She can feel it. Her throat is tight, and she reaches out to choke him, too. But she can’t. The Force won’t do what she wants, and she falls back on her heels and hands, staring at him.

_The light is waiting for you._

Of course the dark side can do what the light can’t. She never needs to fear that a Jedi will strike her with lightning, or close her throat with a closed fist. She has never asked what the light can do that the dark can’t. He’s hardly moved, just turned his head back to face her. Master Snoke told her he had the Skywalker weakness, that his passions ran too deep to keep him closed to the dark side. And she can see them all, in his eyes, in his mouth, in the Force. But there is a frightening and incomprehensible power behind them, as resilient and deathless as water. She could drink him down. He could wash her clean.

“How,” she says. “The bad dreams. How did your uncle stop them.”

He takes a deep breath. She’s ruined his clothes, and she can see his body, soft and strong, accomplishing the animal tasks of breathing and shifting. “He saw them. I tried to hide them. I was ashamed of them, because I thought they meant I was – evil. Like my heart was corrupt in some way no one else’s was.” He swallows. “Just that he saw – and didn’t hate me. Didn’t throw me away. That was almost enough, just by itself.”

He’s struggling with something, and once more she ought to press her advantage, but the memories are fighting free inside her, coming out to meet his; the shame of being so worthless she was sold for less than a good fuel cell, the terror that perhaps that was all she was worth. Or more. The dream she’s no longer sure isn’t memory, where they paid to be rid of her. Where they died to escape her.

The fine callouses his lightsaber has worn into his fingers scrape gently across her skin. She is crying, and he is wiping her tears, and she would hate him except that he is crying too.

“I thought they wanted to get rid of me,” he says, and his voice is rough and snuffly. “I thought they were afraid of me. And they were. They still are. But they love me, too. My uncle sat with me, every night while I slept, and kept my dreams away, and when he got too tired he called my mother. And my mother never wanted to learn to use the Force, Rey, but for me. She learned.”

She shakes her head under his hands, because that’s the difference between them, that’s exactly it: he is loved. She is not. And never has been. “No one – ”

“I will,” he says, before she can even finish. “I’ll do that for you.”

“Why?” she says, grasping his wrists. “Because I fucked you?”

He frowns. “No. Because you’re like me. You shouldn’t be alone.”

“Jedi aren’t supposed to fuck, are they? I don’t want to lie beside you like a _child.”_ (She does, though. Even as she says it, she wants to lie under the weight of his arm, against the warmth of his chest, and share the peaceful steady breathing of his sleep.) “I don’t want to take an oath never to fuck again, never to _want_ anything again. I want to want things, Ben; I want _you.”_ She sucks his thumb into her mouth, and he hisses and trembles, and it seems to her for a moment as if everything will fall back into place, in line with her plans. He will come with her, and they will take what they want, and they will be free.

Then he smiles and everything is in ruins again. “I like your voice; I like it when you say my name, say ‘Ben.’ Better than ‘Jedi.’” He strokes her lip with his thumb, her cheek with his knuckles and then with his palm; he traces the line of her nose with a fingertip, and she’s the one who trembles. “You don’t have to be a Jedi to belong to the light.”

“But the light rejects desire.” And desire has kept her alive. The desire to be free has brought her out of the sand; her furious will to be _worth something_ is what binds her to the Force.

“Well, there’s debate,” he says, and there’s a spark in his eyes. The tears dry out of his eyes and out of his voice, but his hand keeps stroking her face, smoothing down the wisps of her hair. “Because the light seeks to drive back the dark, doesn’t it? And isn’t that a kind of desire?”

“You sound like a holocron,” she says, and tries to make it a sniff and not a sniffle.

“Oh,” he says eagerly, “what holocrons have you seen? Just Sith ones? I heard Snoke had two from Darth Tyranus, one from when he was a Sith and one from when he was a Jedi.”

She stares at him blankly. It’s hard enough to pay attention to what they say; he cares who said it?

“Anyway,” he goes on, sounding a little sulky, _“I_ don’t think wanting things is incompatible with the light, and Uncle Luke doesn’t think so, either. Every time I make him admit it he pretends he hasn’t, though. He says desire is inherently possessive, but he’s just redefining his terms so he wins the argument. Desire doesn’t have to be possessive. I can _want_ to hear you say my name; it doesn’t mean I want you to do it when I think you should, or not to say other things. I want the sun to rise on Coruscant tomorrow; it doesn’t mean I think I own the sun.”

“Ben,” she says again, unsteadily enchanted. Her voice strikes fear into battle-scarred generals, and he compared it to a sunrise. His soft lips widen into a smile, and he inclines his head to her.

“Beautiful things are gifts of the light. And we should admire them.” He draws out the word, _admire._ His finger dips beneath her ear and runs the length of her neck, into the padded collar of her tunic.

“Admire.”

“If you took this off I could admire more of you,” he says, and he sounds so _hopeful._ (No one sounds like that in the First Order. Not even Hux when he get a new weapon.) She’s been told she’s beautiful; even Master Snoke says she’s pretty. Ben Solo _will_ admire her. She wants him to. And admiration is power; she feels the familiar rush in her blood as she anticipates it, undoing the fastenings of the quilted fabric. He’ll admire her, and then he’ll want to touch her, and she can offer and withhold.

But when she drops the garment to her elbows and shows him her shape, he just sits there, looking at her. She pushes down her suspenders, and drags her undershirt slowly over her head, and all he does is sit there, looking at her. His eyes run over every line of her, but he just sits and looks, as if she were a sunrise. 

Then he raises his eyes back to hers, and they’re wet again. “Thank you,” he says, and she feels lost and cold.

“Don’t you want to touch me?”

He blinks, and turns red as a carbon star. “Yes,” he says, but that’s all he says.

“Why don’t you, then?” she says, and lifts a shoulder.

He turns, if possible, even redder. “I don’t know if you want me to,” he says, looking down at his hands. She realizes two things at once: that he’s placed his big hands with deliberation so that she can’t see his cock behind his sleeves, and that he is, carefully, reminding her that she didn’t ask him what he wanted before she fucked him. She flushes then, too, and tries to shove the shame away, but like her memories, it won’t stay gone. Not while he’s there looking at her. Seeing her. How can he tell her the light would want her?

“The light is waiting for you,” he says, out loud, and holds out a hand to her.

“You’re not the light. You want me, but you’re not the light.”

“I know the light,” he says steadily, his eyes on hers, “and I see it in you. The light wants you just as much as the dark wants me.”

She puts her hand into his quickly, like a snake striking, so he won’t see her fingers shake. But he pulls her to him tenderly, and holds her against his shoulder. “Rey. Do you want me to touch you?” 

Why did her desire for him feel like power yesterday, and weakness today? “You can see I do; I know you can. Why are you asking?”

“If you don’t want to say yes, you don’t really mean yes, whatever else I see in you.”

She presses herself against him, kneeling between his legs, and searches his eyes. She feels his breath come harder, and his heart speed up. “You want to hear me say yes.”

“Yes,” he says, and his lips almost graze the bare skin above her breast. “I want it very much.” His hand is so close to the small of her back she can feel the warmth of it. “But not if you don’t.”

She imagines, for a moment, that she will tell him no, just to see frustration in his eyes. Her stubbornness, too, is a passion. But there’s a matching stubbornness in him, a stubborn patience with which he waits, still as a windless lake, until she can’t resist the temptation to dig her fingers into his shining hair and sink her teeth into his shoulder and, as he gasps and jerks against her, hiss into his ear. “Yes. I want you. Touch me, Ben.”

And he does. His huge hands, with their fighter’s callouses and soft palms, slide up her back, over her shoulders, down her arms. She does her best to wreck him, biting, scratching, teasing with her fingers on his thighs, but he lies down again in the dirt, and reaches up to cup her breasts, and it all feels good. His hands on her feel so good her own hands pause; his hands close around her waist, and it feels so good and safe that her eyes close, and when his thumb strokes her navel, and then lower, without loosening that close hold, her head tips back. She’s almost limp in his grip, and he pulls her higher on his body. She spreads her legs to straddle him, and the hole she tore in her trousers widens. The muscles of his stomach are tense and hard beneath her, and he groans when he feels her, wet and still sticky with his come. Rey smiles to see him, writhing underneath her like before.

“I could,” he murmurs, and swallows. “I could get you clean. I could taste you. I want to. Do you want me to?” His hands knead her waist.

“Yes,” she says, “do it. Lick me clean.” And he lifts her like she’s made of feathers, and lays her back with her head on her discarded clothes. His fingers fumble with her trousers but he pulls them down, ripping them down her hips, and she sees the violence in him again, and loves it.

Then he’s on her, fingers and tongue and lips and nose, with her legs over his shoulders. He licks the little rivulet of him that cooled on her thigh, and combs with blunt nails through the little patch of her her curling hair that’s matted down, until it’s soft. She watches, and she’s wet and hungry for him, but he’s so _careful,_ with his big paws and his soft, unsteady mouth, that she reaches down to pull him where she wants him, and finds she only strokes his hair instead.

Then he’s licking across her hole, and as he slips his tongue inside her, his long nose nudges in a way that can’t be accidental, and her practically howls. His tongue is so gentle on her sore flesh and his nose keeps steadily against her, no matter how she twitches and arches and digs her heels against his shoulder. He has to grab her hips, to stay with her, and though it also surely saves him from a broken nose, it’s that steady grip, that will to keep her, that lets her come against him, crying his name, meaning to tell him something by it, mouth open and eyes squeezed shut.

“All clean,” he whispers to her when she comes down, and she laughs, because dirt is ground into her back and ass, but he kisses her. He tastes strange, and bitter, and like her. He kisses her again, and again, until she shakes her head.

“I’m not,” she says. “I’m not all clean.”

“I know,” he says, and sweeps his arm beneath her to draw her close. “But you don’t have to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope  
> For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,  
> For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith  
> But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.  
> Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:  
> So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
> 
> (T.S. Eliot, "East Coker")


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